Latent reasoning replaces natural-language chains of thought with compact continuous "soft-token" representations, reducing the number of intermediate tokens that must be decoded autoregressively. We...
Latent Recurrent Thoughts (LRT) proposes a method for reasoning with frozen large language models by operating in the model’s continuous representation space. A small auxiliary network generates initial latent vectors, which a tiny recurrent reasoner refines over multiple steps, decoupling computational depth from model size. Experiments on symbolic and natural‑language reasoning tasks show that LRT outperforms prior frozen‑decoder continuous‑space methods and chain‑of‑thought prompting while using far less inference compute.
By Zhaoliang Chen, Jie Fu
arXiv:2608. 08113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become the dominant paradigm for eliciting reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it creates substantial computational overhead by forcing models to externalize intermediate reasoning steps as discrete tokens.
By Abhishek Panwar, Maheep Singh, Saksham Bansal
The paper introduces LLoCoT, a looped latent‑reasoning framework that replaces the traditional left‑to‑right generation of chain‑of‑thought tokens with iterative refinement of a compact latent workspace using a shared transformer. By jointly updating latent slots over a few iterations and sampling latent tokens in parallel, LLoCoT feeds these into an autoregressive decoder for answer generation. Experiments on HumanEval and MBPP show that LLoCoT matches or surpasses explicit‑CoT baselines while dramatically reducing reasoning latency and increasing throughput.
By Gerard Grau Garc\'ia, Arnau Padr\'es Masdemont, Niccol\`o Grillo, Jordi Ros-Giralt, Arash Behboodi, Victor Conchello Vendrell
arXiv:2607. 25915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Complex structured reasoning tasks often require additional computation, yet current language models obtain it mainly by increasing parameter scale or by serializing intermediate steps as chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens.
By Yutong Chen, Shouqian Shi, Xinran Liu, Haochen Wang, Jiaying Wang, Tianxing Xu, Yuanxi Wang, Zirui Ding
arXiv:2606. 16360v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by externalizing intermediate computation as discrete text tokens, but this textual interface also introduces redundancy and inference overhead.
By Hanyu Lin, Min Cai, Jiawei Wen, Haodi Zhang
A*-Thought-V2 is a framework that models Chain-of-Thought reasoning as a geometric trajectory in a 3D PCA space, using explicit-implicit latent tokens to compress steps that deviate from the main question-to-solution direction. The method measures alignment angles to decide which steps remain text and which become latent, and introduces stepwise embedding forcing and label forcing to train the architecture. Experiments on Qwen models show up to 2.6% accuracy gains, halved response length, and significant reductions in computation and training time.
By Xiaoang Xu, Siyuan Liu, Shuo Wang, Junlan Feng, Fanyu Meng, Zhu Zhang, Jixun Wang, Xiaorong Wang, Zihan Zhou, Xin Li, Chaojun Xiao, Yiming Zhang, Huijia Wu, Liuyu Xiang, Peipei Li, Zhaofeng He
arXiv:2608. 02585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimization-based latent reasoning improves large language model outputs by optimizing instance-specific continuous states at test time while keeping model parameters frozen.
By Zhaoxin Yu, Qi Shen, Hengli Li, Zhaowei Zhang, Song-Chun Zhu, Chi Zhang, Zilong Zheng
arXiv:2608. 13570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent reasoning has emerged as a powerful alternative to text-based Chain-of-Thought (CoT), offering significant gains in computational efficiency by compressing verbose reasoning into compact embeddings.
By Dayuan Zhao, Shengcao Cao, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui
Lapras is a post‑training framework for Time Series Language Models that replaces explicit Chain‑of‑Thought reasoning with continuous latent thoughts in a joint time‑series‑language space. By self‑distilling from a teacher that generates textual rationales, the student model aligns its hidden states at the answer stage, transferring reasoning ability while producing only the final answer in text. Experiments on four TSLM backbones and five benchmarks show Lapras boosts average F1 by up to 10.79% over explicit CoT and reduces token generation by 23.9×, while still enabling readable reasoning traces through standard decoding.
By Yuliang Chen, Yu Yvonne Wu, Patrick Langer, Arvind Pillai, Sudarshan Regmi, Martin Maritsch, Juncheng Liu, Robert Jakob, Thomas Kaar, Tess Z. Griffin, Lisa Marsch, Michael V. Heinz, Nicholas C. Jacobson, Andrew Campbell
arXiv:2606. 17803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by scaling inference-time compute, yet remain fundamentally stateless, discarding the rich, self-produced reasoning traces generated during this process.
By Vaggelis Dorovatas, Nancy Kalaj, Rahaf Aljundi
arXiv:2511. 20639v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) extend large language models (LLMs) from independent single-model reasoning to coordinative system-level intelligence.
By Jiaru Zou, Ruizhong Qiu, Gaotang Li, Xiyuan Yang, Katherine Tieu, Pan Lu, Ke Shen, Hanghang Tong, Yejin Choi, Jingrui He, James Zou, Mengdi Wang, Ling Yang